Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Subject: Transcript of Commentary for s5 Buffy "Fool for Love"

Date Posted: 14:43:51 10/28/02 Mon

Author: Rahael

Subject: Fool For Love: Doug Petrie’s Commentary

Yeah, thought I’d please the Spike fans to make up for all my Spike

sceptical posts! Here goes, haven’t checked this, just literally

typed all the way through the commentary.

"Fool for Love"

Commentary by Doug Petrie

Scene of Buffy fighting a Vampire in a graveyard. (no commentary over the Spike-y bit of the teaser)

Hi this is Doug Petrie, you lucky DVD viewer/listener and this is Fool for Love. And this is Buffy, kicking a Vampire’s ass. I remember writing this guy as a kind of a Van Halen-y hair do guy……..we hadn’t done the 80s hairband Vampire for a while, so there he is, in his full Van Halen, Def Leppard do.

Buffy just got stabbed! That never happens. But it happened this time. And I’ll explain how we came up with that.

[Credits role]

That scene, which was very very short, was also very very typical and we used that deliberately because there are so many scenes in BtVS that open in a graveyard, she fights a Vampire, she makes some jokes, she’s a little bit cocky, and then she slays the Vampire. This time we wanted to show that her job is intrinsically dangerous and that she’s risking her life every time that she does that, which we’ve

gotten away from a little bit because she’s so good at her job, so we deliberately had Buffy in a very typical, you know the most iconic situation we could get her in and have her pay the price, have her take a big old stake to her gut. I think it was Joss Whedon’s idea to have her stabbed with her own stake.

[Buffy pulling bloodied stake from her stomach]

And here we pick up, a little blood dripping and she can’t believe it. And I love that, I love that thing sticking out of her. It’s such a weird show. Beautiful women getting stabbed with their own stake and karate fighting and you know, the whole scene.

[Buffy fighting Van Halen Vamp]

Vampires are intrinsically dangerous, vampires are tough. Buffy’s been kicking their asses for so long we wanted to re-establish that her job is dangerous. And this the danger of it.

Big build up and

[Riley bursts into the shot, knocking down the Vamp]

Riley shows up! Which is fun. I love working with Marc Blucas, he’s a really cool guy.

We always talk about adding a little bit more special effects to the taser effects. Our big template for that is R2D2 in Star Wars when the J(???) zap him and the little blue laser beams go swirling all over his body. We always want to do stuff like that.

[Riley is bandaging Buffy’s stomach]

Whenever it says "guest starring David Boreanaz" people go crazy. This was my first time working with Juliet Landau and she’s just the greatest. I always wanted to write Drusilla dialogue, and I got to! Which was very exciting for me.

We’re playing a little bit of a sex metaphor here. Not wanting to get caught by mom. It was really tricky with Riley at this point. Here’s this guy - he’s strong, he’s handsome, he’s capable but he just can’t keep up with the Slayer. So Riley feels a little bit left out here. A little bit like a wuss.

And it’s fun having Michelle Trachtenberg interrupt intimate scenes

[Dawn rushes in]

There she is, interrupting an intimate scene! Using the word "sexcapades"! Hiding stuff from mom is kind of a fun thing. It’s a standard of the show.

This episode was written very quickly which is usually a recipe for disaster and much much rewriting. But something kind of clicked with this one. We knew it was a special episode going in. It was very much designed as a two-parter with the Angel episode that was to immediately follow, back when we were on the same network. I asked

Joss Whedon, "what do you do when you’re working around the clock at the office and you need to sleep, and there’s nowhere to sleep?" and Joss told me "go down to the sets" because the sets have really comfortable beds. I actually wound up sleeping in mom’s room. I was looking at all the beds like Goldilocks, trying to find the right bed

to sleep on during the marathon writing session. I tried Xander’s bed but that wasn’t quite right, and then I tried Buffy’s bed, but that just felt awkward and stalkery-fan boy. And then I tried mom’s bed and that was just right.

[Riley being lurky in the graveyard, followed by non-lurky Willow, Xander and Anya]

I love these shots. I think the director uses a slightly wider angle lens on some of these, and it just makes Riley cooler. Here’s our gang, kind of the goof balls.

Riley gets darker and darker throughout this season, and I think this episode was kind of a turn for him. We wanted to separate him from the Scooby gang, because look, they’re all colourful and having fun and eating potato chips and he’s all business. And I think he’s heading down a bad path. He’s going to snap later on.

[Buffy and Giles talking in the Magic Box]

What’s fun about this episode was that we got into Vampire lore, and slayer lore and the history of what it means to be a Slayer. One of the reasons this episode is well liked is because it goes for the core of the series. If you’re a big mythology freak, the way I can be for my favourite tv shows, this really explains a lot about what it

is to be a Slayer and what it is to be a vampire and what their relationship is like, and the intrinsic risk of Buffy’s life and what she goes through and what she’s afraid of. She’s a woman who risks her life all the time, and we have to remind ourselves and the audience that this is a risk, it’s not just a given that she’s going to win all the time. One of the things I love about the Buffy mythology is that it’s a given that she’s going to die, she’s going to be killed in the line of duty sooner or later. She knows that everyday she’s living on borrowed time.

Another theme we’re building here is Giles’ increasing inability to really help Buffy with her training and how painful that is for him. Cos he loves her so much and he takes his job so seriously and they’ve developed such a bond. But there’s only so much he can help her.

[Cut to Spike and Buffy in his crypt]

Working with James is fun. When I told him that I had very little time to write an episode about Spike, he gave me a crate of Red Bull which I drank for four days straight and wrote like a lunatic.

[Spike and Buffy talking in the bronze]

Nick Mark our director did such a great job stylistically with a lot of these scenes, one of these being this scene in the bronze, with the camera gliding around Buffy and Spike. It’s getting a little sexy between these two, which is a fun thing. It’s also very tricky having Buffy be vulnerable in any way when she is supposed to be the strongest character in the series and yet at the same time what good

is a hero without vulnerabilities? So putting a big stab wound in her side is a good way of keeping her emotionally strong but physically vulnerable. And her physical vulnerabilities come out in this episode, things get laid open.

It’s great too that we put Spike in the role of the instructor.

[cut to William composing poetry]

Spike comes up with the word effulgent, and the only thing he can use to rhyme with it.."my heart expands..it grows a bulge in’t". And I was so sure when I wrote it that it was going to get thrown out, it was so preposterous. But Joss Whedon took a shine to it. If you’re really paying attention to the episode you’ll notice that this woman, Cecily becomes a Vengeance demon later on in Season 6.

The same actress plays Halfrek the Vengeance demon. And how that came about is anybody’s guess, because we the writers certainly don’t know how it happened.

We always wondered what Spike was like before he became Spike. We knew that he was William the Bloody. There was a lot of conjecture. I think it started out as a joke, that he would be this bloody awful poet, that he was this ponce. And yet we went ahead and did it. Was he always tough, was he always bad? It was much more interesting to

make him a foppish dandy in the beginning and have him turn into Spike. What you’ll notice too, if you’re watching carefully is that you’ll see James transform from this guy here, having his feelings hurt, being this dandy poet. Piece by piece he will turn into Spike

throughout this episode. Here he’s got different hair, different clothes, glasses, a different accent even and no scar over his eyebrow. And you will see one by one him acquire all these things. So he literally builds Spike piece by piece

[Spike and Cecily alone]

Underneath it all Spike is this guy with a broken heart so that even though he changes, piece by piece, step by step he goes far far away from being this guy, at the end he’s still this guy. He’s changed everything about himself, but he hasn’t changed anything. And that makes Spike a lot more interesting. He becomes so vulnerable here, James is a great actor. I love too that he admits that he’s a bad poet. He knows his limitations. He’s so brave, tell her what he really feels. He knows he’s going to get shot down too.

"I know I’m a bad poet, but I’m a good man"

I think he’s telling the truth. He’s a bad poet but a good man. He wants to be a good man. But that’s something he goes far away from as well, in his century long journey from little William the poet to bad ass Spike. He doesn’t want to be a good man anymore.

We worked a lot with the Angel writers in figuring out the two parter.

[Spike walks down the street, and bumps into Dru, Darla and Angel]

Here, if you’re watching carefully, Spike is going to bump into three people. And they are Angel, Drusilla and Darla. And in the Angel episode, we see the opposite end of that, where we see Angel, Drusilla and Darla walking down the street and some guy bumps into them.

We talk a lot about Pulp Fiction and how Pulp Fiction kind of rearranges time and comes back to things and we talked about these two parters as a kind of Pulp Fiction episode. Where you’d see the B side, and then turn around and see the A side.

[Spike and Dru in the alleyway]

This is actually the B side of a scene. Drusilla comes and she lays this huge line on this poor unsuspecting guy about how great he is and what’s brilliant about Drusilla is that she really is prescient, she really can see inside his heart and here’s this poor guy who

feels so alone and so misunderstood and here comes this strange exotic beauty, coming here and telling him everything he’s thinking and everything he’s feeling with great intimacy. And then she turns him into a vampire.

But what’s great is when you see the other scene, the scene that happened just before, the A side as it were, she’s having a fight with Darla and Angel and she says "I’m just going to go out and find the next ass hole I meet and turn him into a vampire and make him into a playmate". So, does she mean it, does she not mean it? Nobody knows. I think she does mean it, and I bet if you ask Juliet Landau, she’ll say that she does mean it.

I was talking with her when we were shooting this episode and I said "wow, Drusilla is really crazy" and she said "no, she’s not, she really has an internal logic. It’s a non-linear logic but she really does make sense". And if you look close enough, you will find it.

She turns into a vampire, and usually when someone turns into a vampire their victim is petrified or frightened or confused. William is still into it. But it hurts, which we’ve never done before. And then it kind of turns sexual. This is one of the dirtiest episodes

I’ve been involved with. There’s a lot of sexual ecstasy metaphors. Sometimes metaphors, sometimes, just sexual ecstasy!

[cut back to Riley, Xander, Willow and Anya in graveyard spying on Vamp nest]

Now here’s where we see Riley get a little bit…..another twist in the dial in terms of him taking a darker turn. He’s going to blow these guys up in a little bit. You don’t know what Riley’s up to here, he’s a little bit mysterious. He goes in and he sees a collection of stunt men, I believe, having a stunt man party. He says "let’s retreat".

[Buffy and Spike playing pool]

I think this section is shot really beautifully. The camera is always gliding around these two. I don’t know why, maybe it’s a movie thing, but there is something menacing about seeing people play pool. Maybe we’ve seen so many movies where a barfight breaks out..you’ve got to be playing pool when that happens.

[Spike being threatened by Angelus, with Darla and Dru looking on]

It’s kind of fun to see Angel back on Buffy with his original haircut. Everyone’s got great hair in this epsiode. Talking about building Spike piece by piece. Here you’ll notice that Spike’s changed his accent.. Before, he had an upper crust British accent. Now he has a cockney, almost working class accent going on. In conceptualizing this scene, Joss Whedon was very clear about working class differences and social castes, where Spike very much represents the working class and Angel is more the elite, more the kind of aristocracy.

[Angel and Spike fight]

Look how it makes the girls kind of hot that the guys are going to kill each other. It’s all metaphors. The guys are going to drive their poles through each other and the girls get excited by it. It’s all very dirty, which I’m very happy about. And here’s a throwaway line about a Slayer, and Spike has this response: "what’s a slayer?".

[Back to Buffy and Spike playing pool]

Coming up is one of my favourite sequences where he’s talking about what the Slayer means to him. I think it’s fun and exciting.. what this legendary character means in his world. The flip side of it. To us the Slayer is the hero, and in vampire world the slayer is what you tell little kids about to make them behave. He’s like the Keyser Soze, "be careful or the slayer will get you"

That’s great, every vampire has a weapon, whereas the slayer has to grab for a weapon. That’s not just a cool thing we threw in there, it actually played out when he kills the first slayer in the Boxer rebellion. You’ll see that her fatal mistake is that she grabs for her weapon when he already has his. She reaches for a stake and that’s what gets her killed.

[Spike fighting Boxer rebellion Slayer]

And there’s the scar! Piece by piece! We’ve seen him acquire the accent, the name and now the scar.

This stuntwoman is just unbelievable. She was really quiet and polite. I guess when you can kick anyone’s ass, it makes you really polite, cos you don’t have to put on a show. There’s she’s ready to get him, but fate intervenes, there is an explosion outside.And now the tide turns, she’s getting tired. There goes the weapon. She’s still putting up a hell of a fight. She reaches for her weapon and that’s what gets her killed. We really played up the monstrousness of it. That’s just horrible.

And he licks his fingers. So we’re really building a monster here, piece by piece. And when you build a monster, you have to start with a human being, and you realise that they’re not as monstrous as you may originally think and they got this way for a reason. Spike is so deeply insecure. A lot of this killing the slayer is has to do with showing up Angel and knowing that he’s never going to be as potent or as fearsome as Angelus.

[Spike pulls Dru to him]

This is one of the dirtiest things I’ve ever written and I’m still amazed we got it on television, where a Slayer’s blood is an aphrodisiac, and he’s been licking his fingers, he’s covered in blood, there’s a lot of bodily fluids of all kinds going on here but this thing with the finger, I can’t believe we got just that finger on air!

[Dru sucks on Spike’s blood covered finger]

Make of that what you will. Part of the building of Spike is that for the first time he has Drusilla. In their gang, Angelus has all the juice and Spike just gave himself a promotion, he just killed a slayer which is something that Angelus has never done.

[Spike and Dru meet up with Angelus and Darla]

This is fun too, the kind of post-coital sloppy walking around during the carnage and chaos. I love that they are just these double dating college kids out having fun. What’s great is, that Angelus is hiding a secret here. He’s been turned by Gypsies, he now has a soul, so he is revolted by everything that is going on and Spike thinks that Angelus is just jealous that Spike is coming up in the world. The fact is Angelus is freaking out.

This we call the big power shot. That’s their album cover right there. That’s the greatest day of Spike’s life.

[The fanged four walking in slo mo, and then we cut back to Buffy and Spike]

I love that cut, we cut back to him fully formed, with the new hair cut and the black leather coat, and the further twist is that Buffy is revolted by him.

What’s fun about Joss Whedon’s universe is that for a Sci-Fi horror thing, it has a tremendous amount of depth, and what was fun about writing this episode is that you really get to mine the depth of it. You really get to go to all these places which are always there, but you don’t always want to touch upon every week. And here we really..like I said, the deep end of the pool.

[Spike tries to hit Buffy in the stomach]

That’s fun, that when he tries to hurt her, he hurts himself. It’s a little bit tricky for this ep, Spike has this chip, so he can’t hurt Buffy, but how can he demonstrate how to kill a Slayer if he can’t hurt Buffy?

[Riley walking into the Vamp nest]

This is where Riley starts to fall apart. He puts up a pretty good fight. I love that he kills the vamp with the same stake. He gets his girlfriend’s stake back. Here he does something a little bit out of control, setting off a hand grenade.

[Spike and Buffy fight]

I’m amazed no one cried foul during this scene because we’d established that he cannot hit Buffy but in this episode he throws punches at her as part of a demonstration and he explains that he knows he’s not going to hit her, and if there’s no intent to hurt her, then it doesn’t activate the chip. And if you buy that one, then I say thank you!

He’s striking these really deep nerves with her, he’s really going to a place she doesn’t want to go to.

[Cut to Nicki subway fight]

Nicki is great. I am a big fan of 70s cop movies like the French Connection and Shaft, and this is a combination of all these. This is my fan boy dream of doing a 70s cop movie in New York. We originally thought we were going to do this on the subway platform, and Gareth Davies the producer said, "there’s a train over at universal we can use". This is literally done with smoke and mirrors. We used mirrors to make it look as if lights were flashing by.

This intercutting was inspired by, by which I mean ripped off from Reservoir Dogs where Tim Roth’s character tells a story in Reservoir Dogs.

Nicki comes back in comic books. Nicki is a favourite of mine, in Slayer lore. I love that she’s so tough. She’s the Shaft of Slayers.

I was very sorry to see her killed, but you got to do what you got to do. She lives on in my heart.

One of the things about the 70s slayer is that we felt it might be a little arch (this is harsh, that’s just harsh, I hate to see her go), and one of the ways we sold it to Joss Whedon was the big black coat. He picks up the coat, and that’s a bit of a homage to - if you’re a comic book fan - to Frank Miller’s Sin City. There’s this guy called Marv who kills his way up the echelon of this dirty dirty underworld while solving this mystery. And every time he kills a guy, he takes his coat, so he gets a better coat throughout.

And here we have Spike, with the white hair, and the coat and the scar and the accent and the name. And here he’s telling something to Buffy that she just doesn’t want to hear. And the secret is, she wants to die. And ironically, at the end of the season, she does, she gets her wish. See, we do know what we are doing! Believe it or not, we know what we are doing. Most of the time.

[Spike leans forward, trying to kiss Buffy]

This is a late addition to the script, of Spike trying to kiss Buffy. She just can’t believe it, and now he’s all embarrassed and it takes yet another turn. And here she drops the bomb. And here we see Spike get built up piece by piece, and he’s still the same guy, in the parlour with his poetry. This was a big deal. We showed Spike as the bad ass…can we have him cry? And I’m really glad we did. A lot of fans became a lot more sympathetic to Spike around this time. This is a part of that. He cries for a minute. He’s the baddest bad ass in town and he’s crying because this girl says "you’re beneath me".

[Harmony and Spike]

And here we have Harmony for just this one moment. Poor Harmony. She just got so stepped on all the time. And here we have one last flashback. We always wondered what happened to Spike and Dru after they left Sunnydale, and here we see the ugly break up. This is all about people telling other people about things they need to hear but don’t want to hear. This is about people asking questions and not liking the answers. Drusilla is telling the truth here. Drusilla hasmind reading powers, but she doesn’t need them to know that Spike is obsessed with the Slayer and he doesn’t know or admit to himself that he’s obsessed with the Slayer.

[Buffy and Joyce in Joyce’s bedroom]

And here we move the season forward, where mom is quite ill. And Buffy’s got problems of her own. What’s great about this episode is that its building these sexual and violence like tensions between Spike and Buffy, and it builds and builds and builds, and we know that Spike is coming over to Buffy’s house with a shotgun to blow a giant hole in her, and she’s hanging out with mom, getting devastated in a whole different way. So you can have a little room here dramatically to play this scene out for as long as possible because we know that something very bad is coming.

In my first draft I wrote a whole monologue for Joyce about how great her life had been. It was absolutely awful! It was just this giant neon sign saying "I’m going to die!"

[Buffy on porch]

Buffy’s as vulnerable as she can be. And this something nice and unexpected. I’ll just let this scene play out because the actors do so well. I was worried whether it was going to be anti-climactic, but it really isn’t. What’s going to happen between these two? Is it going to be violence or sex? Cos those are the only two things it could be, those are the two things that have been building, and here comes this giant curve.

She doesn’t know what to do with it, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. I love that. She decides to allow him to comfort her.

And that’s our episode! That’s Fool for Love!